AI and Faith’s true superpower is to be found in the spiritual elements of the faith traditions that comprise our expert community. But if, as my own faith tradition asserts in the Epistle of James, “faith without works is dead”, we ordinary humans also have a key role to play in wisely interjecting our diverse faith values into this great debate over AI opportunity and safety. Over our first seven years, as the AI ethics global conversation has mushroomed, AI and Faith has developed a unique cooperative approach that, to me, is our “secondary superpower”. Let me explain it here in five words–channel, amplify, collaborate, catalyze, and leverage–while celebrating all that we have accomplished together in 2024.
As 2024 draws to a close, our community is now 190 invited and vetted Experts in AI technology, ethics, theology and related professions across a wide spectrum, and 22 formal Partners. Our Experts connect us to dozens of organizations where they work, research, create, lead, serve, and advocate. These organizations (though many may not realize it) provide our Experts with platforms to engage the critical questions of AI for good and not destruction, filtered through their personal faith or their recognition of the importance of the faith world to the AI ethics and policy debate.
Beyond our Experts and Partners, there are 1,600 people receiving our newsletter, 923 connections on LinkedIn, 453 Twitter followers, almost 200 followers of our new podcast series this year, and now a number of Bluesky followers. Also, our Members support our work with monetary donations (a large part of almost $80,000 YTD–more than a three-fold increase from 2023) and participate in our Town Halls.
The makeup of our AI&F Expert community is where channel and amplify especially operate. From our inception in 2018, our mission has been to create a channel into the broader AI ethics discussion into which we respectfully amplify the voices of our Experts and Partners. Channel because we encourage every Expert to speak robustly and respectfully from their own faith perspective and beliefs. We amplify by illuminating internal discussions; calling attention to the work of our Experts and Partners on our website and in our publications, social media outreach, and the conferences we help staff; and making connections across our network of formal and informal Partners.
Our increasing engagement with these Partners is where collaborate is particularly advantageous. We are a virtual organization that is almost entirely volunteer-led, while many of our Partners have paid staff, facilities, and their own experts in areas complementary to ours. For example, over four days in July in Washington DC, we co-created with the Museum of the Bible a terrific academic conference on “Generating Wisdom”. Immediately following, Members and Experts collaborated with the Future of Life Institute in a joint program that, in turn led directly into the American Scientific Affiliate’s Annual Meeting where our AI&F speakers also contributed. Such collaboration greatly amplifies our own resources as well as opportunities for our Experts to engage in large and diverse gatherings whose agendas we are able to influence.
Significant growth in our expert community, related followers, and in the conferences we serve, have made us ever more global. Our Experts are in 19 countries, and our LinkedIn connections come from even more countries than our Experts, as do listeners of our podcasts who listened to them in more than 40 countries.
How we work and our cooperative methodology have also continued to evolve as the presence and influence of our Experts and Partners grows in the sectors in which they work. Here is a inelegant but hopefully informative graphic I recently prepared to depict how AI&F has evolved since our founding, to collaboratively leverage the work of our experts and partners for much needed influence in the sectors where our experts and partners work and into the broader AI ethics debate:
AI and Faith consists of the small orange gears to the far left, with our Experts and part-time staff, meshing with our Partners and creating content, programs and connections that we serve to five key sectors of influence where faith-oriented leaders and professionals interact and generate their own great output. These sectors mesh with each other and with the global AI ethics conversation. This process enables us to deepen and empower critical work within each of these sectors.
A key point of the graphic is that it illustrates the importance to us of catalyze and leverage. By combining forces with our Partners and providing valuable inputs to these five key sectors of influence in the center, we catalyze the work of the many organizations making up those sectors (with many of which we have direct connections). Working together we leverage our collective impact beyond our Experts and Partners’ own inputs, into the great global ethics discussion to the right. Imagine the leveraging power if our staff could be tripled in 2025 as we hope to do with our current fundraising!
This year has seen huge amounts of capital and entrepreneurial energy flowing into AI-powered faith applications. Generative AI is providing a rapidly growing new way to interface with Sacred Scripture and discipleship practices. While these innovations are exciting, AI is also subject to the same risks of data abuse, confabulation, and manipulation as secular apps. That burgeoning market especially engages the sectors for Religion-Oriented Applications, Faith Communities, and Technology and Related Professionals. Our AI Trust and Accountability and AI and Sacred Scriptures projects are examples of work that can directly address those opportunities and risks.
Here are just a few other examples of contributions AI&F Experts and Partners have made which leveraged our collective work in 2024:
- As to the Academic, Technology and Related Professionals, Faith Communities, and Religion-Oriented Apps sectors, eight of our Experts collaborated on our Misinformation Hub published mid-year on our website. The Hub provides a technologically sophisticated but easy-to-understand explanation of how our society became inundated with ubiquitous mis- and disinformation and collects other resources by our experts to further explain the problem and potential solutions. Where this effort especially improves on secular sources is explaining why protecting the truth is important from the perspective of six AI&F Experts from different faith traditions. This foundational imperative brings motivation and impact to the challenge of fostering solutions to deep fakes, digital literacy and better social media practices.
- As to the Faith Community sector, AI&F experts comprised almost the entire roster of speakers at a national conference in Seattle in August, which AI&F resourced for tech-oriented leaders of three Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian denominations. This conference included a “morning at Microsoft” where AI&F brought together faith leaders from the conference with senior leaders at Microsoft’s Responsible AI program to discuss how faith-related ethics and values relate to the trustworthiness of Microsoft’s practices and the marketability of its products.
- For each of the five sectors, many of our experts have co-authored and edited important collections of essays over the past 12 months. Just out last month is The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence, co-edited by our new Research Fellow Beth Singler of the University of Zurich, and including essays by our experts Yaqub Chaudhary, Robert Geraci, Marius Dorobantu, David Zvi Kalman, and Noreen Herzfeld. Eight of our experts wrote futurist stories and nonfiction essays for our own first AI&F-produced book out in July, Faithful AI: Stories of Hope from 2045. Six of our experts were among the 19 authors and editors of a monumental analysis of AI and Catholic theology and social justice, Encountering AI, released by the Vatican in December 2023. Encountering AI featured in many interviews, podcasts, and conferences over the course of 2024. Encountering AI continues to provide a deeper foundation for other faith/secular crossover work by global faith leaders and Big Tech companies such as The Rome Call for AI Ethics, for which our new Advisor Fr. Paolo Benanti is the chief architect.
As we wind up 2024, let’s celebrate all of our accomplishments and this evolution in our cooperative organization and look ahead to the promise of continued outsized impact in 2025.
